Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, who co-founded the Sinaloa Cartel and led it for close to four decades, was sentenced to life in prison in federal court in Brooklyn on Monday and ordered to forfeit $15 billion. He is 76.

Zambada pleaded guilty in August 2025 to racketeering conspiracy and to running a continuing criminal enterprise, after the Justice Department agreed not to seek the death penalty. The sentence was handed down by US District Judge Brian Cogan.

The Justice Department said Zambada had spent nearly forty years trafficking fentanyl, cocaine and other drugs into the United States and ordering violence to protect the business. A senior Homeland Security Investigations official called him “the most prolific drug trafficker in modern history.” The Sinaloa Cartel has since been designated a foreign terrorist organisation.

The forfeiture is the largest ordered in a US drug prosecution, and the comparison that gives it scale is close at hand. Judge Cogan also presided over the 2019 trial of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in the same courthouse, where Guzmán received life plus thirty years and a $12.6 billion forfeiture order. Adjusted for consumer-price inflation, $12.6 billion in 2019 is worth about $16.5 billion in 2026 money, which makes Monday’s order slightly the smaller of the two in real terms.

Zambada’s arrest in July 2024 ended decades in which he was the most prominent Mexican trafficker never to have been captured. He was taken into custody after a private plane carrying him and Joaquín Guzmán López, one of El Chapo’s sons, landed at an airstrip in New Mexico. Zambada has said he was kidnapped and flown across the border against his will.

Prosecutors described the outcome as the product of cooperation between US and Mexican law enforcement. Joseph Nocella Jr., the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said Zambada “will spend the rest of his life in a U.S. prison, exactly where he belongs,” and that the sentence meant his years of evading justice would not become permanent.

Forfeiture orders on this scale are built from estimates rather than from seized property. In Guzmán’s case prosecutors reached $12.6 billion by totalling estimated sales across roughly twenty-five years — about $11.8 billion in cocaine, $846 million in marijuana and $11 million in heroin. Figures assembled that way are rarely collected in any meaningful proportion, and the 2019 order has not been.